The Decline of the Telos

This chapter begins by outlining some crucial distinctions between Neo-Aristotelian and more ‘modern’ post-enlightenment ethics and considers the implications of these differences for the concept of social harm. It then begins a journey that will explore how Aristotelian ideas of the telos and human flourishing – which previous chapters have argued to be crucial to establishing social harm's conceptual coherence – have moved from the core to the periphery of political, economic, socio-cultural, and moral life. It starts in Graeco-Roman antiquity, before considering how the emergence of Christianity and its revolutionary domain assumptions began a process that, with the onset of liberalism and capitalism, would come to marginalise Aristotelian ideas and prohibit their re-entry into political, moral, and intellectual life; a re-entry that the concept of social harm desperately needs.